Editor’s Note: This is Part III of a series. Read Part I here, and Part II here.

Does Costa Rica hold the secret to happiness? According to a number of different studies, Costa Ricans are the happiest people on the planet, with a longer life expectancy than Americans. Over the past weeks, major news outlets such as the New York Times and the BBC have reported on these results. One figure, called “happy life years,” results from merging average self-reported happiness (where subjects rate their happiness on a ten-point scale) with longevity. Using this system, Costa Rica ranks first, the United States is 19th, and Zimbabwe comes in last.

Another approach combines happiness and life expectancy but adjusts for environmental impact. Here again, Costa Rica tops the list, achieving contentment in an environmentally sustainable way. The Dominican Republic ranks second, the United States 114th (because of its huge ecological footprint) and again Zimbabwe is last. One could argue that happiness is linked to the preservation of nature and people’s access to it — Costa Rica has made the protection of biodiversity a top priority with its extensive network of national parks and indigenous reserves. The country also prohibits private ownership of the coastline, even forcing large hotels to run shuttles across their property to allow locals access to the beach.

We got to check out the Costa Rican health care system up close recently when Louis went to the hospital to get a botfly removed from his belly! This nasty little jungle pest bites you and lays an egg which grow into a worm-like larva. His was only about an eighth of an inch long, but apparently if left there they can grow much longer — gross! However, the experience of the hospital was very positive: the wait wasn’t long, the staff were friendly (joking that the larva they extracted was their new pet) and guess what? When we were finished and asked for the bill, they laughed and waved goodbye – it was free! Needless to say, that made us very happy.

Latin American countries generally score higher on happiness surveys, perhaps because of the cultural emphasis on family and community.

As New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof pointed out, another major reason for Costa Rican happiness might be traced to a decision made in 1949 to abolish the national army and invest instead in education. The investment paid off in many ways: a more stable society free from the violent conflict that has ravaged much of Central America; a narrowing of the gender gap (a few days ago Costa Rica elected its first woman president); and a strong economy that has fostered the effective health care and social systems.

Costa Rican pacifism and biodiversity are both sources of national pride — while waiting in line when we first arrived at the airport on this trip, we enjoyed a video which proclaimed “our army” over footage of leafcutter ants, monkeys and iguanas, and “our navy” over footage of fish and sea turtles.

My family has now been living here for over two months, working on the development of a nascent ecovillage called Tacotal, and examining for ourselves what we need to be happy. Having stripped down our lives from the comforts and amenities of California to a tent in the jungle with no electricity, we’ve been slowly rebuilding those luxuries and considering what comforts are truly necessary to us. Last week we moved into our newly-built bamboo and wood casita, which we managed to complete for about $1500. Nearly all of us in the community (now about 15) contributed to making it over the past month, and it’s definitely made me happier to have a little more space and some furniture.

The A-frame casita serves as a two story sleeping and living space for me, Louis, little Lîla and baby Ren. The roof is a tarp made of a repurposed advertising banner, which works for the dry season but will probably be replaced by something more permanent in May (we see the Kotex logo directly over our heads when we lie in bed). The floor and some of the framing is laurel, a hardwood that (so we hear) is locally and sustainably harvested. The main framework, deck floor, and ladder are Costa Rican bamboo, and the walls are made of a breathable shade cloth they call zaran.

A next step is to work on getting some more solar power. At present we’ve got one 56 watt photovoltaic panel for the community, which is not enough to meet all of our needs. We’re working on the design for our own composting toilet nearer to our cabin, which will all serve as the mount for our own panel (currently somewhere on route from the United States). More lights at night and a baby monitor so we could go up to hang out in the community kitchen after putting the kids to bed would make me happy.

Among the other upcoming projects are putting in a polished earthen floor for the main kitchen, which is currently made of loose dirt (imagine our 3 year-old after a day of playing in the kitchen and the way our baby continually drops her toys—ugh!) Fixing the floor might help reduce the need for building the bike-powered washing machine we’ve been collecting materials for. We’ve got most of the parts save one key gear that has been hard to get a hold of. The rest of the community seems somewhat ambivalent about the washing machine, but I’ve got a pressing need, and that is cleaning diapers.

Diapering is a big question for many new parents, and by now between the two kids I think we’ve tried about all the options — disposables, diaper laundering services, compostables, and washing our own. With Lîla we also started “elimination communication” at six months, teaching her the sign language for “toilet” and having her use the potty at an early age. Here in the jungle, it just didn’t seem right to use disposables for baby Ren, especially when we have no garbage pickup and have to bring our own garbage into town and find a dumpster. Sign language for "toilet" has an obscene connotation here. Not to mention the fact that we’re supposed to be starting an ECO-village. Unfortunately, we’ve learned that the sign language for “toilet” also means “sex from behind” in Costa Rica….

We’ve gone through the suitcase of compostable diapers I dragged down here. So for now, I’m hand washing the cloth ones in solar-heated hot water, with bio-detergent (imported), soap berries, and limes (both from our land). We spray off the poop into a special compost pit, which after some time will be full of super rich soil. It’s what permaculturists call a closed-loop cycle. And to balance out this fairly unpleasant labor of love, we spend the money we’d use for disposables to pay a local mama to do our other laundry in her machine, so I have time for other things (like making marmalade with some of our million oranges).

For me, happiness is finding that precious overlap between sustainability and comfort, where my family’s needs are met within the boundaries of a healthy ecosystem. And that’s what permaculture is— creating positive, regenerative relationships between humans and the planet. If Costa Rica has a secret to happiness, perhaps it is in the ways it has put this ethic into practice, for the benefit of its people and its environment.

Editor’s Note: This is part two of a series. Read Part I here.

Yoga on the deck which will become our temporary bedroom

We’ve been here a month now, and I’m actually writing from a hammock with my laptop powered by the sun, underneath a pair of orange trees. This is our new “living room” in this experiment in outdoor living, outfitted with a log bench, a couple of rocking chairs woven with cord in the local style, outdoor kitchen and shower and a repurposed buoy that serves as a swing. A few steps away are kitchen and shower, cross a little bridge to the bathtub/dipping pool, and another few meters is our newly finished wooden platform where soon we’ll be sleeping. For now it makes a great yoga deck and has a sweet view across the Machuca River valley to a steep hillside dotted with grazing white cows.

A lot of folks have called us “brave” to move out here with our two little daughters, Serenne (5 months) and Lîla (3 years). From my perspective, parenting here allows me to do basically the same things I’ve been doing at home in Berkeley, but with more of a sense of purpose and alignment with my values. Whereas in the U.S. I find myself feeling like a somewhat unwilling, slightly apologetic housewife, driving my little ones around, grocery shopping and turning up the heat to stay warm, here I can take care of my family’s needs with a much smaller ecological footprint. That is, minus the impact of the plane flight here, which is considerable — a subject I’d like to return to in a future post.

Being in the jungle with a pre-crawling baby is easier than it will be when she’s on the move, as I spend much of my time with her in a carrier. My approach to parenting is strongly inspired by Jean Liedloff’s book The Continuum Concept, which is linked to “attachment parenting” and the resurgence of baby wearing in the U.S. Liedloff based her book on experiences living with indigenous people in the Amazon and observing their relationships with their babies and children. She believes that allowing babies to spend the majority of their first year worn close to mama’s body and snuggled close to her at night helps develop an essential sense of security and trust that stays with the child into adulthood. This concept of “kangaroo care,” and the idea of skin to skin contact as important, especially for newborns, has started to gain credence even in U.S. hospitals.

While the indigenous families observed often saw mama carrying her baby, she would usually have him or her in a sling or wrap so that hands could be free for work, even while nursing. Yet when mama tired of carrying baby, the extended family and community were often available and interested in spending time with the little one. This way of raising children feels right and sensible to me, in contrast to the way I feel when I’m home alone with my baby all day, isolated and trying to stay sane, and driving my toddler to and from preschool.

So far, even though the number of us living at Tacotal is small, my reality has been much closer to that of the indigenous mama, and I love that. There are lots of hands to hold baby and tell stories or show plants and animals to Lîla. The one major issue is that little Serenne’s thermostat is set to North America, so she has been really hot since being here. In the heat of the day when it seems too hot to wear her, I put her in her play gym in the kitchen and give her lots of little baths. She is just as cheerful as she’s always been most of the time, and I’ve been giving her little tastes of our bananas (we’ve harvested a big bunch from one of our trees since arriving) in anticipation of starting her on solid foods in a few weeks. She doesn’t seem to know what to do with the banana yet but is very interested in the new taste. I’m anticipating that when she starts crawling in a few months, it will be trickier as there are currently no baby-friendly floors here. An upcoming project will likely be to finish the kitchen floor, which is now dirt, and make a polished earthen/adobe floor. This will also cut down the frequency of laundry that’s needed and hopefully reduce the layer of red dust that big sister Lîla usually wears around.

I wrote earlier that we’re able to meet our needs with a smaller ecological footprint, and want to discuss a few of the systems that make that true. One major difference from life at home is being off the power grid and away from municipal garbage and sewage lines . I can honestly say I enjoy my daily visit to our composting toilet here, which is up on a breezy hillside and built of bamboo, wood, and recycled materials. It has a small area in front for pee that separates it from the poop, which allows the “humanure” to dry out and prevents bad odor. Instead of flushing, we put a few cups of sawdust in to complete our mission and close the loop (food to poop back to soil where we grow more food).

With no garbage pickup here, we are very aware of the waste we create, and in fact I’m looking right now at the border of our “living room,” marked with green glass wine bottles. Since we don’t have a fridge, we buy more dry bulk items with less packaging. We separate out organic waste for the worm compost, leftovers that feed the chickens, and citrus for the regular compost. Packaging is separated into plastic, glass and metals which can be recycled and paper and cardboard is used for kindling in the wood stove. Another ingenious little system which was put into place since we last visited involves creating building material — mass that can be built into an earthen wall — by stuffing small plastic and cellophane bags that can’t be reused into empty plastic bottles.

Stephen demonstrates how to ‘flush’ the composting toilet

Of course, a major difference from home and one of my favorite parts of being here is the lack of driving. I especially dislike trying to get two kids in and out of their carseats several times a day and fighting the traffic in the Bay Area. The road in here is so rough that you need a good reason to drive out — riding a horse or walking is actually more comfortable. With the number of folks living here, we each only need to leave every few weeks for groceries, though most of us probably venture out once or twice a week to get supplies, go to a restaurant, or visit the beach (about 30 minutes from the end of our bumpy road to the first Pacific beach at Tarcoles. Since I want Lîla to be able to learn more Spanish and have a chance to interact with more kids (there is presently just one other kid here, her good friend Jazz), we’ll be driving a bit more often when the two of them start school next month. Unless we find a school accessible by horse!

Continue on to read Part III

The family in front of our jungle kitchen

Up until now, we’ve collected stories from around the world on this Culture of Permaculture blog – reports back from inspiring sites that we feel are in some way demonstrating solutions to the serious social and environmental crises our generation faces.  The posts have included profiles of places that my family and like-minded collaborators have visited and conversations we’ve had on topics such as community, ecological design, and living in balance with natural systems. 

Our goal is to publish a tabletop-style book (read more about the Sustainable   [R]evolution book project here) that showcases these design solutions in practice around the world, from urban community gardens to indigenous villages to permaculture centers.  As an anthropologist, I’ve been writing and editing the manuscript from an ethnographic perspective, looking at these places as evidence of an emerging, international culture of sustainable living. 

This entry marks the beginning of a new era of this research.  Instead of simply visiting these sites, we have the incredible opportunity to create one.   About two years ago, my family decided to join a group of people who formed a collective to buy 55 acres of land in Costa Rica.  Many of the members of the group knew each other from an annual Burning Man camp they were part of; some, like us, were connected through Stephen Brooks.  Stephen is the ever-optimistic and energetic creative force behind Punta Mona, a permaculture center on the Carribean side of Costa Rica, and Kopali Organics, a natural and fair trade food company.  His unmatched networking abilities and experience living and working in Costa Rica made it possible for 33 people – American, Costa Rican and Mexican – to come together and ante up to be part of the community we named Tacotal. 

Most contributed money ($12,500 per ¼ “pod”, with 8 pods total); a few contributed sweat equity with jobs ranging from accounting to construction and engineering.  We use the pod system to organize ourselves and make decisions, and together the 8 pods form a legal corporation which officially owns the land.  Since it has not been subdivided as of now, none of us actually own our individual home sites.  We’re all in this together, for better or worse.  This is part of what allowed the price tag to be so low – many of the costs associated with buying land here come from the expenses of subdividing.  It creates a different sort of community too, one based much more on trust and long-term involvement, as selling shares is somewhat complicated in this setup.

The first banana harvest since our arrival

Tacotal is the local name for the incredibly resilient, fast-growing vegetation that comes up after land has been cleared.  As one of our community members pointed out yesterday at a meeting, Tacotal is the start of the forest that perpetually regenerates: pure potential.

It feels like this year, we’re starting to gain some momentum and make bigger strides toward the realization of that potential.  When the opportunity to purchase the land came up two years back, we needed to move quickly.  At that time, the majority of the community members were not ready to make the move to the land permanently.   So Tacotal has faced the complexity of being a largely virtual community, except the month or so around our annual meeting, which has drawn about half to three-quarters of the members to the land.  Much of what has been built and planted was done by a handful of members who could devote more time and energy.  This includes several Ticos (Costa Ricans) who live in the capital, San Jose, and came on weekends, sometimes organizing permaculture workshops or other courses that brought helping hands to the land.

That brings me to our location—we’re on the Rio Machuca (one of the best features of the land is it allows us to go for a swim in various pools and little waterfalls) about an hour from San Jose and 30 minutes to the Central Pacific Coast and the Jaco area.  It feels tropical and jungle-forested but drier than a rainforest.  The town of Atenas isn’t far, and its climate has been called the best in the world by NASA and National Geographic.  The nearest town to us is San Mateo de Orotina, only a couple of miles away, but as of now our road is in a state that requires at least 15 minutes to navigate those few bumpy miles.

Arriving at San Jose airport – it’s hard to travel light with two kids!

Because of this, ironically, our first step in establishing our eco-life here was buying an SUV!  This was hard to bring ourselves to do as people who have rallied against the awful American propensity for huge gas guzzlers that are only used to drive on nice smooth roads.  Anyway you can’t access our land here without a serious 4 x 4.  At least we got a diesel and have plans to convert it to veggie oil….  after much research we ended up going for a Nissan Terrano, bought through a website called crautos.com and with the help of our Tico friends.  It’s been handling the road really well so far.

 A crazy synchronicity with the Nissan – not sure what this is evidence of besides globalization and some kind of law of attraction.  The car appears to have been made for sale in Japan – it has Japanese writing on it in several places.  In 1998, I lived in Japan in a small city called Asahikawa, in the northernmost island of Hokkaido, working as an English teacher.  When I looked carefully at the writing on the car, I saw the kanji for Asahikawa – I think it came from a dealer there, of all places!

So our first week here was tied up with finding and buying the car, and trying to figure out the intricacies of getting cell phone/internet service – this has been complex and is still pending.   We also managed to set up a mailbox, get mattresses, and learn a little bit about the layout of San Jose.  It’s a major challenge getting around there as there are no real addresses – no house/building numbers and just a handful of named or numbered streets (and you’re super lucky if they are marked even if they do have a name!)  Directions are something like this:  “Go past the church, make a left, you’ll see a panaderia on the right, go 200 meters past that to the sleeping dog and make a U turn – don’t go the wrong way down the unmarked one way street…”.

Lila juicing oranges

We finally made it to the farm about 10 days ago and this is the first time I’ve had a minute at an Internet café to post.  Tacotal is dripping with oranges at the moment and we’re making a ton of juice and have made a few attempts at marmalade.  There are also a ton of bananas in four different varieties and lots and lots of limes – I made a tasty banana ceviche last week which we learned about at a San Jose restaurant. They call it Guinean Ceviche.

 Since we were here last the place has obtained a dog and we hear there have been no snake sightings in a while which makes us all breathe a sigh of relief.  We’ve been staying in one of the star plate domes which went up since we last visited, and working on building the cabin that we will stay in for these months while we are building our “real” house.  Our daughter Lîla, who will be three in a couple of days, is having a great time taking care of the chickens, looking for lizards and butterflies, and swinging on the rope swing.…

I will sign off for now and next time write more about the permaculture systems at Tacotal and the challenges of parenting in the jungle.

What exactly is "balance"? Our society rightly strives for balance, and many issues are deservedly considered by presenting a balanced set of opinions.

There are however clear cases in which the only balance that matters is the balance of evidence rather than of opinion: Serial killer Ivan Milat’s protestations of innocence should not – and did not – balance the evidence arrayed against him. The desire to cure AIDS with garlic and beetroot does not balance the medical consensus that the disease is caused by HIV and can only be beaten by retroviral drugs. And the current wave of sensationalism and distortion cannot balance the scientific consensus that climate change is real and is caused by human emissions.

The current descent of the climate debate into a cauldron of misrepresentations that are at odds with scientific reality must therefore be of concern.

It must be of concern that climate scientists can be publicly accused of having vested financial interests in their research, when in fact Australian research grants cannot be used to top up a researcher’s salary.

It must be of concern when segments of the national media frequently distort and misrepresent scientific articles and scientists’ statements in complete departure from accepted standards of journalistic honesty and decency.

It must be of concern when segments of the media echo the meme that "global warming stopped in 1998" when in fact all years since 2000 — that is 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 — are among the 10 hottest years ever recorded since 1880. The probability of this happening by chance is small.

It must be of concern that the current Leader of the Opposition has publicly dismissed climate science and instead cosily chats with a visiting British aristocrat who is a serial fabricator — an individual who has publicly misrepresented himself as a member of the House of Lords when he is not; who claims to have cured influenza as well as AIDS; who claims to have won the Falkland War by means of biological weapons; who accuses NASA of blowing up their own research satellites; and whose latest pseudo-mathematical pronouncements about climate change are at odds with past ice age cycles.

It must be of grave concern when the opinions of the same conspiracy theorists who believe that Prince Phillip runs the world’s drug trade are given credence by the media when it comes to climate change.

No, balance in media coverage does not arise from adding a falsehood to the truth and dividing by two. Balanced media coverage of science requires recognition of the balance of evidence.

What then is the true balance of evidence on climate change?

Fact is that the most recent survey of thousands of Earth scientists around the world revealed a 97 per cent agreement with the proposition that human activity is a contributor to climate change. This peer-reviewed study clarifies that the present "debate" about climate change is not actually a debate within the relevant scientific community.

Fact is that a recent analysis of nearly 1,000 peer reviewed publications by a prominent historian of science revealed no disagreement with the view that climate change is happening and is caused by human CO2 emissions. If each of those publications were presented on a poster, as is common at scientific conferences, the line of posters would stretch across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and back again. Yes, there are a few dissenting papers that have appeared in refereed journals — but to date none have withstood subsequent scrutiny.

Fact is that there is a strong scientific consensus on climate change and its human-made causes that is exhaustively summarised in the nearly 3,000 pages of the most recent IPCC report that draws on more than 18,000 sources. Tellingly, the lone error about Himalayan glaciers on page 493 of the contribution from Working Group 2 was brought to the public’s attention by … an IPCC lead author!

Anyone can experience this scientific consensus hands-on in a few seconds: Google "climate change" and you get nearly 60 million hits. Now go to the menu labelled "more" at the top, pull it down and choose the "scholar" option. 58 million hits disappear. The remaining scientific information will get you in touch with the reality on this planet, in the same way that applying the "scholar" filter after googling "sex" eliminates 500 million porn sites and leaves you with civilised discourse about sexuality.

Does this indubitable scientific consensus guarantee that the evidence concerning climate change is necessarily irrefutable?

No.

As with any other scientific fact, new evidence may come to light that can overturn established theories. Two core principles of science are scepticism and falsifiability — that is, scientific facts must be subject to sceptical examination and they must be refutable in principle. New evidence may overturn the current view that HIV causes AIDS, and new evidence may revise our expectation that gravity will have adverse consequences for those who jump off the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Likewise, new evidence may force a revision of our understanding of climate change.

It is however utterly inconceivable that the current scientific consensus about climate change will be overturned by conspiracy theories that are inversions of reality.

It is utterly inconceivable that the consensus on climate change will be weakened by mendacious misrepresentations in the media that fail to accurately represent the strength of scientific evidence.

It is utterly inconceivable that all the arguments against climate change that have been falsified multiple times will rise from the dead and overturn scientific knowledge.

Instead, the very fact that many of the roughly 100 falsified "sceptic" talking points are continually reiterated in public draws a clear dividing line between healthy scepticism and arrogant denialism.

Sceptics seek answers and scrutinise arguments before accepting the current state of scientific knowledge as fact. Denialists dismiss sound arguments, solid data, and experimental evidence in favour of propositions that have long been shown to be flawed.

The world’s pre-eminent scientific journal, Nature, therefore refers to those who cling to long-debunked pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories while dismissing the findings of thousands of peer-reviewed studies by their true label — denialists.

The potentially devastating consequences of denialism are brought into sharp focus by the sad history of South Africa’s AIDS policies. Despite having one of the world’s highest rates of HIV infections, the government of President Thabo Mbeki went against consensus scientific opinion 10 years ago and declined anti-retroviral drugs, preferring instead to treat AIDS with garlic and beetroot. Politicians even accused a leading South African immunologist of defending Western science and its "racist ideas" for his insistence on scientific treatment methods. According to a recent peer-reviewed Harvard study, this denialism cost the lives of more than 330,000 South Africans.

For that, President Mbeki and his associates are now held in richly deserved contempt around the world.

Precisely the same fate awaits denialists of climate change.

The laws of physics will relentlessly assert themselves, unswayed by public opinion, political shenanigans, or elections. Ultimately, the laws of physics will speak so loudly that no amount of wishful thinking can prevent them from being heard; but because any delay in taking action against climate change will increase the human and financial burden on future generations, it is our responsibility now to cease tolerating lies, misrepresentations, puerile accusations, and conspiracy theories that are unworthy of public discourse in a mature democracy.

Many spirited conversations about climate change can be had that examine the likely consequences for Australia and evaluate the best course of action — but those conversations must be firmly rooted in the core scientific principles of scepticism and falsifiability and they must not be contaminated by ignorance and denialism.

Orava Castle, north central Slovakia
All photographs copyright © Craig Mackintosh

Contrast and Change

I count it quite a privilege to be one of very few ‘Westerners’ to have been able to visit and observe the transition of former east-bloc countries – from shortly after their break-up from communism, through successive visits until today. It is now eighteen years since my first visit, and, in some places more than others, much has changed.

Looking back, I remember my initial trip to central Europe back in 1992 (then called the ‘East Bloc’). Entering Czechoslovakia from Germany was, to me, like leaving the earth and landing on the moon – except without the space travel in between to get one accustomed to the idea of where one was heading! The difference between the Europe I was familiar with, and the land I discovered immediately beyond the Czech border control, was like day and night. There was no gradual blending of the two civilisations – it was pure contrast.

Travelling on to the Slovak half of Czechoslovakia (or ‘Slovakia’ as of January 1, 1993, when Czechoslovakia peacefully split into the Czech and Slovak Republics) brought a great deal of interest and discovery for me – it was, to a great extent, like travelling back in time. The vehicles, buildings – even colours – were old, and tired. There was only a few makes of vehicle – Czechoslovakian Skodas, Russian Ladas, and the notorious East German ‘Trabant’, made up the bulk of traffic. For heavy transport there were only the smaller blue (always blue!) Czechoslovakian LIAZ, Praga and Tatra trucks.

The east German trabant. Performance & Specifications: 650kg weight, 594cc
displacement, 2 stroke, 2 cylinders, 25bhp (19kW), 4-speed gearbox, front wheel
drive, 0 – 100kph in [an exhilarating] 21 seconds, top speed 112kph, ‘Duroplast’
body panels (plastic containing resin strengthened by wool or cotton). This blue
smoke spewing car became the poster child of liberation from communism as
thousands of people rushed into western Europe in them when the
wall fell in 1989.

Shops sold a very limited range of goods, often of poor quality, and food items were often out of date. Service was ‘blunt’ to say the least. Because in communism everything is owned by the state, and whether you work hard, or hardly at all, you would benefit little from your effort, there was no incentive to go beyond the call of duty. It was very difficult to lose your job, the customer was definitely not king, and there was certainly no ‘suggestion box’.

Today, these countries are a real mixed bag. I still see contrast, but now the contrast is found within these countries themselves. There has been a lot of change, and, as expected, some good and some not – depending on your perspective.

Paneláks in Slovakia – today these are inhabited by a large percentage of
the country’s middle class

While the socialist politicians in power had always been ardent communists before, now they were quick to denounce the ideology and embrace capitalism as if it had always been their secret love. When communism ended here, there were no guillotines in the streets, no revolution, no violence. The nations’ leaders simply changed hats and continued in their positions, trying to bumble their way forward, awkwardly, into a new world chasing the great American dream.

Rather than develop local infrastructure at a community level, western businesses struck all the right deals and rushed in en masse in a kind of wild west economic, gold rush free-for-all. Collectivisation has continued in a new form. Old communist style apartment buildings (Paneláks) now overlook large, modern Tesco trucks delivering goods to new supermarkets from enormous distribution centres that source goods at great energy expense from all corners of the globe. McDonalds serves their standard fare alongside many other outlets in large western-style food courts. Service is improving in places, particularly from young retailers – who never had to live with the feeling of being controlled, or now unlearn the attitude that gave.

The UK’s Tesco has greatest control over the market in Slovakia today

Young entrepreneurs drive Audis and BMWs out of car lots, and onto new motorways. Previously, even if you could afford a car, you had to put your name on a waiting list, and do exactly that – wait! Now, the western problem of traffic jams and queues has well and truly arrived as more and more people get mobile. In fact, villagers in some areas are so up in arms about the tremendous flow of large new trucks they’re threatening blockades.

The leap from forty-five years of communism to full-blown capitalism is one that takes time – but some of these countries have certainly made headway, and, like in western countries, the move to large centralised stores is coming at great cost. Britain’s Tesco, Austria’s Billa and Germany’s Lidl chains have staked their claim and have become the dominant forces on the big box store landscape. Like the the west, these large supermarkets destroy the small, local ‘butcher, baker, and candlestick-maker’. Many of the smaller stores I used to frequent, co-ops which sourced their goods locally, are today closed, or in a worse state than before communism fell. They cannot compete. The move to low-paid production-line staff with just a few ‘fat cats’ occurred in double-quick fashion, and, in this scenario, the fat cats live in foreign lands, so profits do not return to the nation as a whole, let alone the community.

Some people are “lovin’ it”, and some are left behind. Some are now prosperous, and some penniless. During communism everyone was guaranteed a job, but not opportunity. Now there is enormous potential, but great obstacles – obstacles largely created by the exasperating but all-pervasive belief that anything ‘western’ must be better. At the time of the breakup of communism, there were calls from a few sober-minded souls, from both the ‘East’ and the ‘West’, that these nations would do well to take a moment of pause and consider a ‘third way‘. But these voices, which now seem almost prophetic, were drowned out amid a jubilant party mood, as a weary citizenry sought to reach for the stars. Since then, secretive corporate/political collusion has ensured the powerful their desired economic wedge into this newly accessible territory.

Not yet being as ‘fully developed’ as, say, the US or UK capitalist system, the effects of the 2008/2009 recession arrived late to these areas. But now that it’s here people are feeling the pinch. With growing unemployment, and a migration back home of workers that went abroad, people are increasingly pondering their future and questioning the wisdom of post-communism decisions. Official figures state that 13 percent of Slovakia’s population is living with, to use their diplomatic term, “borderline poverty.” For those who are mathematically challenged – that’s one in every eight people. At the same time, I see western charities seeking donations from these countries barely able to deal with their own problems.

People who had lived healthy, low carbon, sustainable lives in villages scattered all over the country are now dying of old age, their skills dying with them – while their children have vanished to the cities or foreign countries like Germany, the UK or further afield in search of a ‘better life’, plugging into the money economy just in time to see it collapse. Families are, just like in the west, getting more and more fragmented, while large-scale monoculture farming moves into place instead.

An often-asked question in the west is “can capitalism have a conscience?” It is sure that communism didn’t – their disregard for the environment and human rights, for example, is notorious, and although all were meant to be equal, the communist-period joke that “some people are more equal than others” was definitely more than just humour. But, can these societies that have, despite their bleak circumstances, traditionally been made up of tightly knit and supportive extended families, retain their ‘wholesome charm’ while rushing headlong into this new economy?

Kings and Conquerors – Capitalism ‘Triumphs’ Where They Didn’t

It’s fascinating to me that where centuries of kings and conquerors failed, capitalism is making short work of unraveling these localised economies. This region has been inhabited by Slavic peoples for a millennia and a half, some say much longer. These were largely agricultural, peasant folk, working their land, their gardens and husbanding their animals in what was often a peaceful, culture rich existence.

Almost every Slovak valley and village had its own unique design of traditional
dress – often extremely intricate and exquisite (see detail below). Such
time consuming and beautiful, ’superfluous’, work is evidence that this culture’s
lifestyle went well beyond just menial endeavours. [Note: excuse the happy
face - I am respecting the model's wish not to be published online]

Over these many centuries different invaders have done their worst – including the Romans, the Huns (think Atilla), early Germanic tribes, the Tatars (Turks), the Mongols (Genghis Khan), the Ottoman Empire, the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, the Austria-Hungarian dual monarchy, and of course much of these periods were only interruptions of eras of Hungarian control and even forced Magyarisation, where the Slovak language was banned in churches and schools. (In an interesting twist, this linguistic conflict continues today.) Then came the short lived but highly repressive Nazi invasion and the subsequent ‘liberation’ into complete communist control.

Although at times through the centuries the Slavic inhabitants were slaughtered and their homes and lands taken by force, by and large the life of peasant folk continued despite the presence of these oppressors. The sun rose and set over their fields, seeds were sown and crops harvested, wool was spun or made into felt so clothes could be made, lumber grew and was turned into homes – regardless of who claimed ownership over their existence from distant cities.

Villagers work their gardens under the Tatry mountains

These people lived by their own ingenuity and from the resources that surrounded them. There are still plenty of signs of this way of life alive today, a glimpse of which we’ll catch below, but capitalism’s economic subjugation of the people has been effective in a way that armies and swords never were. Money has won over might. Where people before might defend their land and life from invading armies, now they voluntarily, eagerly, give them up. Physical labour and frugal living has now become a life to be shunned and discarded, rather than defended. The poisoned carrot offered by media-led capitalism lures people away from their traditional, community-oriented sustainable existence, towards a dream of leisure and wealth. But, as we’re seeing today, that dream is just that – a dream. The youth are now discovering they’ve left their village to chase a mirage – a journey that has left them wholly vulnerable and dependent on a system over which they have no control.

In the capital, Bratislava, in the southwest of Slovakia, is a small city of Paneláks called Petržalka, where up to 115,000 people live in what is the most densely packed residential district in Central Europe. While a legacy of communism, it is also a fitting example of the kind ‘western development’ we see elsewhere. As a high rise city, it effectively becomes a large scale work camp, where workers can be tightly packed in close proximity to industry, to service the corporate need for labour. Without land, residents are wholly dependent on the money economy. I fear for regions like this in coming years – when peak oil’s stranglehold on the economy becomes all to real, and the trucks supplying food to the scattered supermarkets fail to show, what will become of these people who’ve painted themselves into a fossil fuel dependent corner?

A Glimpse of Past Resilience

Their names have been changed to protect their true identities – but let me introduce a wonderful couple I met a few years ago. I found them in the north of Slovakia, and they were kind enough to let me photograph them.

Marge & Ted

Ted was 86 at the time, and Marge 80. They live a very simple, self-sufficient life, hidden away from modernity in a tiny village in the hills. Their knowledge of the outside world was somewhat indicated by their questioning how long it would take to drive to New Zealand.

Ted is from a large family – he had eleven siblings – and has been a shepherd and peasant farmer all of his life. Marge’s mother died prematurely, so her family was not so large. Ted and Marge bore three children themselves, one of whom died from cancer a few years ago at the age of forty-nine.

One of their sons is pictured here – he lives with Ted & Marge, along with his wife. They all work together, and appear to be very happy in their work and life.

I was privileged to see some of the activities they perform in their daily work. Amongst these was the manufacture of a smoked cheese they sell. Here you can see Ted removing the two halves of a mould the cheese is formed in:

The cheese is produced from two cows that are housed in a straw-strewn stall underneath their house. The cows are kept inside through the harsh winter and were due to be taken outside within a day of my visit.

It is worth noting that, generally, people on the streets of Slovakia are usually very reluctant to smile or greet you. Wave to a villager as you pass by and more often than not they’ll just stare. Communism bred a certain amount of hesitancy and suspicion amongst the populace. In fact, many lived nervous of being reported to the authorities for offences (whether real or manufactured), and learned to be careful in making acquaintances. But, in contrast to this, when someone in Slovakia opens their home to you, they well and truly make up for their street-side aloofness.

Marge was very ‘animated’, and immensely pleased with my visit. She mentioned other people and activities in the village, and suggested I also visit a man a few houses along. I decided to take her suggestion, and promised to return afterwards.

Stan

Meet Stan. Stan was 68 at the time, and, like most villagers, a jack of many trades. He worked in a factory for much of his life, but had many other activities outside of this labour. He is a blacksmith, carpenter, builder, and hunter, amongst others.

He has (again, like most villagers) built his own house and almost everything within it. Stan was eager to show me his Remington single-shot rifle – with which he has shot boar, deer, and much more (antlers, stuffed animals, and the frozen stares from animal heads covered his walls). Hunting was clearly his primary passion – even the bottle and shot glasses he produced for sharing his homemade plum brandy (slivovica) were adorned with pictures of his prey.

More like rocket fuel than a beverage – but one must be polite…

Stan took me out to see a large old loom he had housed in an outbuilding, with which his wife weaves carpets from offcut material sourced from nearby. The loom is over 120 years old, and “never breaks down, nor needs oiling,” he proclaimed.

Back at Marge and Ted’s house, I discover the floors have been swept, benches wiped, and her hair brushed. Hospitality is in full swing, and I find myself needing to be careful what I accept, for fear I may not be able to keep it down! Already at Stan’s I struggled to swallow some of the stringy highly salted cheese that is popular in this region.

Ted offered a hearty cup of “Zincica” (there are accents needed on these letters I cannot provide with this keyboard!). This beverage is the result of boiling the thin milk that remains after producing cheese, until the Zincica (Zin-cheat-sa) floats to the top and is scooped off – ready to enjoy!

I left as Ted, Marge, and her son prepared to plant potatoes that afternoon. Marge’s son readied the plough for this purpose.

Marge gave me the warmest hug as I departed. I felt like I was from another planet entirely – but she made me feel right at home.

I am always humbled and impressed by people that can live apart from the hugely unsustainable society most of us don’t know how to escape. Even many well intentioned, and brave, ‘alternative’ individuals that attempt to live as these people do, find it virtually impossible to do so. Ted, Marge, Stan, and their families – with their fruit trees, their gardens, chickens, food preserving and root cellars – all learned innumerable skills from their parents that are now being discarded by a new generation who do not realise their value. But, as the vulnerabilities of our house-of-cards globalised economic system become obvious, some, even amongst the young, are starting to see value again in the accumulated wisdom of the past. Permaculture certainly has a lot to offer these people in fine tuning their traditional methods for increased efficiency and productivity.

These countries are changing – of that there is no doubt. As someone that’s lived mostly in western societies – I can’t help but wish they could learn from our mistakes, and not be too quick to discard their past completely. It seems with their new freedom there is much to gain, but perhaps also much that could get lost.

Why did America’s leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests–and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as "unworkable" and "unrealistic," as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?

At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted "brands" in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters–and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.

I have spent the past few years reporting on how global warming is remaking the map of the world. I have stood in half-dead villages on the coast of Bangladesh while families point to a distant place in the rising ocean and say, "Do you see that chimney sticking up? That’s where my house was… I had to [abandon it] six months ago." I have stood on the edges of the Arctic and watched glaciers that have existed for millenniums crash into the sea. I have stood on the borders of dried-out Darfur and heard refugees explain, "The water dried up, and so we started to kill each other for what was left."

While I witnessed these early stages of ecocide, I imagined that American green groups were on these people’s side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path–one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation.

Environmental groups used to be funded largely by their members and wealthy individual supporters. They had only one goal: to prevent environmental destruction. Their funds were small, but they played a crucial role in saving vast tracts of wilderness and in pushing into law strict rules forbidding air and water pollution. But Jay Hair–president of the National Wildlife Federation from 1981 to 1995–was dissatisfied. He identified a huge new source of revenue: the worst polluters.

Hair found that the big oil and gas companies were happy to give money to conservation groups. Yes, they were destroying many of the world’s pristine places. Yes, by the late 1980s it had become clear that they were dramatically destabilizing the climate–the very basis of life itself. But for Hair, that didn’t make them the enemy; he said they sincerely wanted to right their wrongs and pay to preserve the environment. He began to suck millions from them, and in return his organization and others, like The Nature Conservancy (TNC), gave them awards for "environmental stewardship."

Companies like Shell and British Petroleum (BP) were delighted. They saw it as valuable "reputation insurance": every time they were criticized for their massive emissions of warming gases, or for being involved in the killing of dissidents who wanted oil funds to go to the local population, or an oil spill that had caused irreparable damage, they wheeled out their shiny green awards, purchased with "charitable" donations, to ward off the prospect of government regulation. At first, this behavior scandalized the environmental community. Hair was vehemently condemned as a sellout and a charlatan. But slowly, the other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups swelled–so they, too, started to take the checks.

Christine MacDonald, an idealistic young environmentalist, discovered how deeply this cash had transformed these institutions when she started to work for Conservation International in 2006. She told me, "About a week or two after I started, I went to the big planning meeting of all the organization’s media teams, and they started talking about this supposedly great new project they were running with BP. But I had read in the newspaper the day before that the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] had condemned BP for running the most polluting plant in the whole country…. But nobody in that meeting, or anywhere else in the organization, wanted to talk about it. It was a taboo. You weren’t supposed to ask if BP was really green. They were ‘helping’ us, and that was it."

She soon began to see–as she explains in her whistleblowing book Green Inc.–how this behavior has pervaded almost all the mainstream green organizations. They take money, and in turn they offer praise, even when the money comes from the companies causing environmental devastation. To take just one example, when it was revealed that many of IKEA’s dining room sets were made from trees ripped from endangered forests, the World Wildlife Fund leapt to the company’s defense, saying–wrongly–that IKEA "can never guarantee" this won’t happen. Is it a coincidence that WWF is a "marketing partner" with IKEA, and takes cash from the company?

Likewise, the Sierra Club was approached in 2008 by the makers of Clorox bleach, who said that if the Club endorsed their new range of "green" household cleaners, they would give it a percentage of the sales. The Club’s Corporate Accountability Committee said the deal created a blatant conflict of interest–but took it anyway. Executive director Carl Pope defended the move in an e-mail to members, in which he claimed that the organization had carried out a serious analysis of the cleaners to see if they were "truly superior." But it hadn’t. The Club’s Toxics Committee co-chair, Jessica Frohman, said, "We never approved the product line." Beyond asking a few questions, the committee had done nothing to confirm that the product line was greener than its competitors’ or good for the environment in any way.

The green groups defend their behavior by saying they are improving the behavior of the corporations. But as these stories show, the pressure often flows the other way: the addiction to corporate cash has changed the green groups at their core. As MacDonald says, "Not only do the largest conservation groups take money from companies deeply implicated in environmental crimes; they have become something like satellite PR offices for the corporations that support them."

It has taken two decades for this corrupting relationship to become the norm among the big green organizations. Imagine this happening in any other sphere, and it becomes clear how surreal it is. It is as though Amnesty International’s human rights reports came sponsored by a coalition of the Burmese junta, Dick Cheney and Robert Mugabe. For environmental groups to take funding from the very people who are destroying the environment is preposterous–yet it is now taken for granted.

This pattern was bad enough when it affected only a lousy household cleaning spray, or a single rare forest. But today, the stakes are unimaginably higher. We are living through a brief window of time in which we can still prevent runaway global warming. We have emitted so many warming gases into the atmosphere that the world’s climate scientists say we are close to the climate’s "point of no return." Up to 2 degrees Celsius of warming, all sorts of terrible things happen–we lose the islands of the South Pacific, we set in train the loss of much of Florida and Bangladesh, terrible drought ravages central Africa–but if we stop the emissions of warming gases, we at least have a fifty-fifty chance of stabilizing the climate at this higher level. This is already an extraordinary gamble with human safety, and many climate scientists say we need to aim considerably lower: 1.5 degrees or less.

Beyond 2 degrees, the chances of any stabilization at the hotter level begin to vanish, because the earth’s natural processes begin to break down. The huge amounts of methane stored in the Arctic permafrost are belched into the atmosphere, causing more warming. The moist rainforests begin to dry out and burn down, releasing all the carbon they store into the air, and causing more warming. These are "tipping points": after them, we can’t go back to the climate in which civilization evolved.

So in an age of global warming, the old idea of conservation–that you preserve one rolling patch of land, alone and inviolate–makes no sense. If the biosphere is collapsing all around you, you can’t ring-fence one lush stretch of greenery and protect it: it too will die.

You would expect the American conservation organizations to be joining the great activist upsurge demanding we stick to a safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: 350 parts per million (ppm), according to professor and NASA climatologist James Hansen. And–in public, to their members–they often are supportive. On its website the Sierra Club says, "If the level stays higher than 350 ppm for a prolonged period of time (it’s already at 390.18 ppm) it will spell disaster for humanity as we know it."

But behind closed doors, it sings from a different song-sheet. Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, in Arizona, which refuses funding from polluters, has seen this from the inside. He told me, "There is a gigantic political schizophrenia here. The Sierra Club will send out e-mails to its membership saying we have to get to 350 parts per million and the science requires it. But in reality they fight against any sort of emission cuts that would get us anywhere near that goal."

For example, in 2009 the EPA moved to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, which requires the agency to ensure that the levels of pollutants in the air are "compatible with human safety"–a change the Sierra Club supported. But the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the EPA to take this commitment seriously and do what the climate science says really is "compatible with human safety": restore us to 350 ppm. Suckling explains, "I was amazed to discover the Sierra Club opposed us bitterly. They said it should not be done. In fact, they said that if we filed a lawsuit to make EPA do it, they would probably intervene on EPA’s side. They threw climate science out the window."

Indeed, the Sierra Club’s chief climate counsel, David Bookbinder, ridiculed the center’s attempts to make 350 ppm a legally binding requirement. He said it was "truly a pointless exercise" and headed to "well-deserved bureaucratic oblivion"–and would only add feebly that "350 may be where the planet should end up," but not by this mechanism. He was quoted in the media alongside Bush administration officials who shared his contempt for the center’s proposal.

Why would the Sierra Club oppose a measure designed to prevent environmental collapse? The Club didn’t respond to my requests for an explanation. Climate scientists are bemused. When asked about this, Hansen said, "I find the behavior of most environmental NGOs to be shocking…. I [do] not want to listen to their lame excuses for their abominable behavior." It is easy to see why groups like Conservation International, which take money from Big Oil and Big Coal, take backward positions. Their benefactors will lose their vast profits if we make the transition away from fossil fuels–so they fall discreetly silent when it matters. But while the Sierra Club accepts money from some corporations, it doesn’t take cash from the very worst polluters. So why is it, on this, the biggest issue of all, just as bad?

It seems its leaders have come to see the world through the funnel of the US Senate and what legislation it can be immediately coaxed to pass. They say there is no point advocating a strategy that senators will reject flat-out. They have to be "politically realistic" and try to advocate something that will appeal to Blue Dog Democrats.

This focus on inch-by-inch reform would normally be understandable: every movement for change needs a reformist wing. But the existence of tipping points–which have been overwhelmingly proven by the climate science–makes a mockery of this baby-steps approach to global warming. If we exceed the safe amount of warming gases in the atmosphere, then the earth will release its massive carbon stores and we will have runaway warming. After that, any cuts we introduce will be useless. You can’t jump halfway across a chasm: you still fall to your death. It is all or disaster.

By definition, if a bill can pass through today’s corrupt Senate, then it will not be enough to prevent catastrophic global warming. Why? Because the bulk of the Senate–including many Democrats–is owned by Big Oil and Big Coal. They call the shots with their campaign donations. Senators will not defy their benefactors. So if you call only for measures the Senate could pass tomorrow, you are in effect giving a veto over the position of the green groups to the fossil fuel industry.

Yet the "conservation" groups in particular believe they are being hardheaded in adhering to the "political reality" that says only cuts far short of the climate science are possible. They don’t seem to realize that in a conflict between political reality and physical reality, physical reality will prevail. The laws of physics are more real and permanent than any passing political system. You can’t stand at the edge of a rising sea and say, "Sorry, the swing states don’t want you to happen today. Come back in fifty years."

A classic case study of this inside-the-Beltway mentality can be found in a blog written by David Donniger, policy director of the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), after the collapse of the Copenhagen climate summit. The summit ended with no binding agreement for any country to limit its emissions of greenhouse gases, and a disregard of the scientific targets. Given how little time we have, this was shocking. Donniger was indeed furious–with the people who were complaining. He decried the "howls of disaster in European media, and rather tepid reviews in many U.S. stories." He said people were "holding the accord to standards and expectations that no outcome achievable at Copenhagen could reasonably have met–or even should have met."

This last sentence is very revealing. Donniger believes it is "reasonable" to act within the constraints of the US and global political systems, and unreasonable to act within the constraints of the climate science. The greens, he suggests, are wrong to say their standards should have been met at this meeting; the deal is "not weak." After fifteen climate summits, after twenty years of increasingly desperate scientific warnings about warming, with the tipping points drawing ever closer, he says the world’s leaders shouldn’t be on a faster track and that the European and American media should stop whining. Remember, this isn’t an oil company exec talking; this is a senior figure at one of the leading environmental groups.

There is a different way for green groups to behave. If the existing political system is so corrupt that it can’t maintain basic human safety, they should be encouraging their members to take direct action to break the Big Oil deadlock. This is precisely what has happened in Britain–and it has worked. Direct-action protesters have physically blocked coal trains and new airport runways for the past five years–and as a result, airport runway projects that looked certain are falling by the wayside, and politicians have become very nervous about authorizing any new coal power plants [see Maria Margaronis, "The UK's Climate Rebels," December 7, 2009]. The more mainstream British climate groups are not reluctant to condemn the Labour government’s environmental failings in the strongest possible language. Compare the success of this direct confrontation with the utter failure of the US groups’ work-within-the-system approach. As James Hansen has pointed out, the British model offers real hope rather than false hope. There are flickers of it already–there is an inspiring grassroots movement against coal power plants in the United States, supported by the Sierra Club–but it needs to be supercharged.

By pretending the broken system can work–and will work, in just a moment, after just one more Democratic win, or another, or another–the big green groups are preventing the appropriate response from concerned citizens, which is fury at the system itself. They are offering placebos to calm us down when they should be conducting and amplifying our anger at this betrayal of our safety by our politicians. The US climate bills are long-term plans: they lock us into a woefully inadequate schedule of carbon cuts all the way to 2050. So when green groups cheer them on, they are giving their approval to a path to destruction–and calling it progress.

Even within the constraints of the existing system, their approach makes for poor political tactics. As Suckling puts it, "They have an incredibly naïve political posture. Every time the Dems come out with a bill, no matter how appallingly short of the scientific requirements it is, they cheer it and say it’s great. So the politicians have zero reason to strengthen that bill. If you’ve already announced that you’ve been captured, then they don’t need to give you anything. Compare that to how the Chamber of Commerce or the fossil fuel corporations behave. They stake out a position on the far right, and they demand the center move their way. It works for them. They act like real activists, while the supposed activists stand at the back of the room and cheer at whatever bone is thrown their way."

The green groups have become "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party, regardless of how pathetic the party’s position is," Suckling says in despair. "They have no bottom line, no interest in scientifically defensible greenhouse gas emission limitations and no willingness to pressure the White House or Congress."

It will seem incredible at first, but this is–in fact–too generous. At Copenhagen, some of the US conservation groups demanded a course of action that will lead to environmental disaster–and financial benefits for themselves. It is a story buried in details and acronyms, but the stakes are the future of civilization.

When the rich countries say they are going to cut their emissions, it sounds to anyone listening as if they are going to ensure that there are fewer coal stations and many more renewable energy stations at home. So when Obama says there will be a 3 percent cut by 2020–a tenth of what the science requires–you assume the United States will emit 3 percent fewer warming gases. But that’s not how it works. Instead, they are saying they will trawl across the world to find the cheapest place to cut emissions, and pay for it to happen there.

Today, the chopping down of the world’s forests is causing 12 percent of all emissions of greenhouse gases, because trees store carbon dioxide. So the rich governments say that if they pay to stop some of that, they can claim it as part of their cuts. A program called REDD–Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation–has been set up to do just that. In theory, it sounds fine. The atmosphere doesn’t care where the fall in emissions comes from, as long as it happens in time to stop runaway warming. A ton of carbon in Brazil enters the atmosphere just as surely as a ton in Texas.

If this argument sounds deceptively simple, that’s because it is deceptive. In practice, the REDD program is filled with holes large enough to toss a planet through.

To understand the trouble with REDD, you have to look at the place touted as a model of how the system is supposed to work. Thirteen years ago in Bolivia, a coalition of The Nature Conservancy and three big-time corporate polluters–BP, Pacificorp and American Electric Power (AEP)–set up a protected forest in Bolivia called the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project. They took 3.9 million acres of tropical forest and said they would clear out the logging companies and ensure that the forest remained standing. They claimed this plan would keep 55 million tons of CO2 locked out of the air–which would, in time, justify their pumping an extra 55 million tons into the air from their coal and oil operations. AEP’s internal documents boasted: "The Bolivian project…could save AEP billions of dollars in pollution controls."

Greenpeace sent an investigative team to see how it had turned out. The group found, in a report released last year, that some of the logging companies had simply picked up their machinery and moved to the next rainforest over. An employee for San Martin, one of the biggest logging companies in the area, bragged that nobody had ever asked if they had stopped. This is known as "leakage": one area is protected from logging, but the logging leaks a few miles away and continues just the same.

In fact, one major logging organization took the money it was paid by the project to quit and used it to cut down another part of the forest. The project had to admit it had saved 5.8 million tons or less–a tenth of the amount it had originally claimed. Greenpeace says even this is a huge overestimate. It’s a Potemkin forest for the polluters.

When you claim an offset and it doesn’t work, the climate is screwed twice over–first because the same amount of forest has been cut down after all, and second because a huge amount of additional warming gases has been pumped into the atmosphere on the assumption that the gases will be locked away by the now-dead trees. So the offset hasn’t prevented emissions–it’s doubled them. And as global warming increases, even the small patches of rainforest that have technically been preserved are doomed. Why? Rainforests have a very delicate humid ecosystem, and their moisture smothers any fire that breaks out, but with 2 degrees of warming, they begin to dry out–and burn down. Climatologist Wolfgang Cramer says we "risk losing the entire Amazon" if global warming reaches 4 degrees.

And the news gets worse. Carbon dioxide pumped out of a coal power station stays in the atmosphere for millenniums–so to genuinely "offset" it, you have to guarantee that a forest will stand for the same amount of time. This would be like Julius Caesar in 44 BC making commitments about what Barack Obama will do today–and what some unimaginable world leader will do in 6010. In practice, we can’t even guarantee that the forests will still be standing in fifty years, given the very serious risk of runaway warming.

You would expect the major conservation groups to be railing against this absurd system and demanding a serious alternative built on real science. But on Capitol Hill and at Copenhagen, these groups have been some of the most passionate defenders of carbon offsetting. They say that, in "political reality," this is the only way to raise the cash for the rainforests, so we will have to work with it. But this is a strange kind of compromise–since it doesn’t actually work.

In fact, some of the big groups lobbied to make the protections weaker, in a way that will cause the rainforests to die faster. To understand why, you have to grasp a distinction that may sound technical at first but is crucial. When you are paying to stop deforestation, there are different ways of measuring whether you are succeeding. You can take one small "subnational" area–like the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project–and save that. Or you can look at an entire country, and try to save a reasonable proportion of its forests. National targets are much better, because the leakage is much lower. With national targets, it’s much harder for a logging company simply to move a few miles up the road and carry on: the move from Brazil to Congo or Indonesia is much heftier, and fewer loggers will make it.

Simon Lewis, a forestry expert at Leeds University, says, "There is no question that national targets are much more effective at preventing leakage and saving forest than subnational targets."

Yet several groups–like TNC and Conservation International–have lobbied for subnational targets to be at the core of REDD and the US climate bills. Thanks in part to their efforts, this has become official US government policy, and is at the heart of the Waxman-Markey bill. The groups issued a joint statement with some of the worst polluters–AEP, Duke Energy, the El Paso Corporation–saying they would call for subnational targets now, while vaguely aspiring to national targets at some point down the line. They want to preserve small patches (for a short while), not a whole nation’s rainforest.

An insider who is employed by a leading green group and has seen firsthand how this works explained the groups’ motivation: "It’s because they will generate a lot of revenue this way. If there are national targets, the money runs through national governments. If there are subnational targets, the money runs through the people who control those forests–and that means TNC, Conservation International and the rest. Suddenly, these forests they run become assets, and they are worth billions in a carbon market as offsets. So they have a vested financial interest in offsetting and in subnational targets–even though they are much more environmentally damaging than the alternatives. They know it. It’s shocking."

What are they doing to ensure that this policy happens–and the money flows their way? Another source, from a green group that refuses corporate cash, describes what she has witnessed behind closed doors. "In their lobbying, they always talk up the need for subnational projects and offsetting at every turn and say they’re great. They don’t mention national targets or the problems with offsetting at all. They also push it through their corporate partners, who have an army of lobbyists, [which are] far bigger than any environmental group. They promote their own interests as a group, not the interests of the environment." They have been caught, he says, "REDD-handed, too many times."

TNC and Conservation International admit they argue for subnational accounting, but they claim this is merely a "steppingstone" to national targets. Becky Chacko, director of climate policy at Conservation International, tells me, "Our only interest is to keep forests standing. We don’t [take this position] because it generates revenue for us. We don’t think it’s an evil position to say money has to flow in order to keep forests standing, and these market mechanisms can contribute the money for that."

Yet when I ask her to explain how Conservation International justifies the conceptual holes in the entire system of offsetting, her answers become halting. She says the "issues of leakage and permanence" have been "resolved." But she will not say how. How can you guarantee a forest will stand for millenniums, to offset carbon emissions that warm the planet for millenniums? "We factor that risk into our calculations," she says mysteriously. She will concede that national accounting is "more rigorous" and says Conservation International supports achieving it "eventually."

There is a broad rumble of anger across the grassroots environmental movement at this position. "At Copenhagen, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing," says Kevin Koenig of Amazon Watch, an organization that sides with indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin to preserve their land. "These groups are positioning themselves to be the middlemen in a carbon market. They are helping to set up, in effect, a global system of carbon laundering…that will give the impression of action, but no substance. You have to ask–are these conservation groups at all? They look much more like industry front groups to me."

So it has come to this. After decades of slowly creeping corporate corruption, some of the biggest environmental groups have remade themselves in the image of their corporate backers: they are putting profit before planet. They are supporting a system they know will lead to ecocide, because more revenue will run through their accounts, for a while, as the collapse occurs. At Copenhagen, their behavior was so shocking that Lumumba Di-Aping, the lead negotiator for the G-77 bloc of the world’s rainforest-rich but cash-poor countries, compared them to the CIA at the height of the cold war, sabotaging whole nations.

How do we retrieve a real environmental movement, in the very short time we have left? Charles Komanoff, who worked as a consultant for the Natural Resources Defense Council for thirty years, says, "We’re close to a civil war in the environmental movement. For too long, all the oxygen in the room has been sucked out by this beast of these insider groups, who achieve almost nothing…. We need to create new organizations that represent the fundamentals of environmentalism and have real goals."

Some of the failing green groups can be reformed from within. The Sierra Club is a democratic organization, with the leadership appointed by its members. There are signs that members are beginning to put the organization right after the missteps of the past few years. Carl Pope is being replaced by Mike Brune, formerly of the Rainforest Action Network–a group much more aligned with the radical demands of the climate science. But other organizations–like Conservation International and TNC–seem incapable of internal reform and simply need to be shunned. They are not part of the environmental movement: they are polluter-funded leeches sucking on the flesh of environmentalism, leaving it weaker and depleted.

Already, shining alternatives are starting to rise up across America. In just a year, the brilliant 350.org has formed a huge network of enthusiastic activists who are demanding our politicians heed the real scientific advice–not the parody of it offered by the impostors. They have to displace the corrupt conservationists as the voice of American environmentalism, fast.

This will be a difficult and ugly fight, when we need all our energy to take on the forces of ecocide. But these conservation groups increasingly resemble the forces of ecocide draped in a green cloak. If we don’t build a real, unwavering environmental movement soon, we had better get used to a new sound–of trees crashing down and an ocean rising, followed by the muffled, private applause of America’s "conservationists."

~~~~~~
Johann Hari is a columnist for the Independent in London and a contributing writer for Slate. He has been named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International for his reporting from the war in Congo.

Many people think that in India cows are almost universally worshipped, and treated better than your pampered collie or russian blue. But, the reality is that although killing cows is illegal in all but two states in the country, these laws are poorly enforced, and local officials are often bribed to turn a blind eye to both the cruelty and slaughter of these animals. And where they aren’t killed in states where it’s illegal, they’re forced to walk vast distances until they reach the states where killing is legal, or they’re crammed like sardines into trucks and train carriages in stifling hot conditions and taken there. Because of the distances involved, the herders often have to resort to extreme acts of cruelty to ‘encourage’ the animals to continue their trek – like breaking their tails and rubbing hot spices into their eyes, and worse. An example of ‘worse’ is making them drink water laced with copper sulphate. It destroys their kidneys so they can’t urinate, so while in agony upon arrival they are also heavier and fetch a better price.

This article gives you a bit of a start on the topic, and the video below is well worth a watch. Warning – extreme animal cruelty footage:

For me, scale is always the source of our problems – be they environmental, ethical or otherwise.

by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom

Those who hate environmentalism have spent years looking for the definitive example of a great green rip-off. Finally it arrives and no one notices. The government is about to shift £8.6bn from the poor to the middle classes. It expects a loss on this scheme of £8.2bn, or 95% (1). Yet the media is silent. The opposition urges only that the scam should be expanded.

On April 1st the government introduces its feed-in tariffs. These oblige electricity companies to pay people for the power they produce at home. The money will come from their customers, in the form of higher bills. It would make sense, if we didn’t know that the technologies the scheme will reward are comically inefficient.

The people who sell solar photovoltaic (PV) panels and micro wind turbines in the UK insist that they represent a good investment. The arguments I have had with them have been long and bitter (2,3). But the debate has now been brought to an end with the publication of the government’s table of tariffs: the rewards people will receive for installing different kinds of generators (4). The government wants everyone to get the same rate of return. So while the electricity you might generate from large wind turbines and hydro plants will earn you 4.5p per kilowatt hour, mini wind turbines get 34p, and solar panels get 41p. In other words, the government acknowledges that micro-wind and solar PV in the UK are between seven and nine times less cost-effective than the alternatives.

It expects this scheme to save 7m tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2020 (5). Assuming, generously, that the rate of installation keeps accelerating, this suggests a saving of around 20m tonnes of CO2 by 2030. The estimated price by then is £8.6bn (6). This means it’ll cost around £430 to save one tonne of carbon dioxide.

Last year the consultancy company McKinsey published a table of cost comparisons (7). It found that you could save a tonne of CO2 for £3 by investing in geothermal energy, or for £8 by building a nuclear power plant. Insulating commercial buildings costs nothing; in fact it saves £60 for every tonne of CO2 you reduce; replacing incandescent lightbulbs with LEDs saves £80 per tonne. The government predicts that the tradeable value of the carbon saved by its £8.6bn scheme will be £420m (8). That’s some return on investment.

The reason for these astonishing costs is that the government expects most people who use this scheme to install solar panels. Solar PV is a great technology – if you live in southern California. But the further from the equator you travel, the less sense it makes (9). It’s not just that the amount of power PV panels produce at this latitude is risible, they also produce it at the wrong time. In hot countries, where air conditioning guzzles electricity, peak demand coincides with peak solar radiation. In the UK peak demand takes place between 5 and 7 on winter evenings. Do I need to spell out the implications?

We have plenty of ambient energy, but it’s not to be found on people’s roofs. The only renewables policy that makes sense is to build big installations where the energy is – which means high ground, estuaries or the open sea – and deliver it by wire to where people live. But the government’s scheme sloshes money into places where resources are poor and economies of scale impossible.

We don’t need to guess the results: the German government made the same mistake ten years ago. By 2006 its generous feed-in tariffs had stimulated 230,000 solar roofs, at a cost of E1.2bn. Their total contribution to the country’s electricity supply was 0.4% (10). Their total contribution to carbon savings, as a paper in the journal Energy Policy points out, is zero (11). This is because Germany, like the UK, belongs to the European Emissions Trading Scheme. Any savings made by feed-in tariffs permit other industries to raise their emissions. Either the trading scheme works, in which case the tariffs are pointless, or it doesn’t, in which case it needs to be overhauled. The government can’t have it both ways.

A week ago the German government decided sharply to reduce the tariff it pays for solar PV, on the grounds that it’s a waste of money (12). Just as the Germans have begun to abandon their monumental mistake, we are about to repeat it.

Buying a solar panel is now the best investment a householder can make. The tariffs will deliver a return of between 5-8% a year, which is both index-linked (making a nominal return of 7-10% (13)) and tax free (14). The payback is guaranteed for 25 years (15). If you own a house and can afford the investment, you’d be crazy not to cash in. If you don’t and can’t you must sit and watch your money being used to pay for someone else’s fashion accessory.

Had this money been spent instead on insulation or double glazing, it could have helped relieve fuel poverty at the same time as cutting emissions. But the feed-in tax is both wasteful and regressive. The government has now decided not to oblige people to improve the efficiency of their homes before they can claim a tariff: you’ll be paid to put a solar panel on your roof even if the roof contains no insulation (16).

Though there’s a system to ensure that functioning devices are installed, it can’t be long before thousands of petty criminals discover the perfect carousel fraud, bypassing their solar panels by connecting the incoming wire to the outgoing wire. By buying electricity for 7p and selling it for 44p (if you sell power to the grid rather than using it yourself, you get an extra 3p(17)), they’ll make a 600% profit. Amazingly the government has decided not to measure how much electricity people are selling, but “to pay export tariffs on the basis of estimated (deemed) exports.”(18) Elsewhere in its report it boasts of “encouraging a risk-based approach to audit and assurance” (19). Come on in you crims, the door is wide open.

So who is opposing this lunacy? Good question. The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have lined up to denounce the government for not being generous enough (20,21,22,23). The only body to have called this right is the loathsome TaxPayers’ Alliance, but no one listened because it has cried wolf too often(24).

There appears to be a cross-party agreement to squander the public’s money. Why? It’s partly because many Tory and LibDem voters hate big, efficient windfarms, and this scheme appears to offer an alternative. But it’s mostly because solar panels accord with the aspirations of the middle classes. The solar panel is the ideal modern status symbol, which signifies both wealth and moral superiority, even if it’s perfectly useless.

If people want to waste their money, let them. But you and I shouldn’t be paying for it. Seldom has there been a bigger public rip-off; seldom has less fuss been made about it. Will we try to stop this scheme, or are we a nation of dupes?

References:

1. DECC, 1st February 2010a. Impact Assessment of Feed-in Tariffs for Small-Scale, Low Carbon, Electricity Generation (URN10D/536). http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/consultations/elec_financial/elec_financial.aspx
2. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125715.200-smallscale-renewable-power–lowwattage-thinking.html
3. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19225740.100-think-small.html
4. DECC, 1st February 2010b. Table of tariffs up to 2013. http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/what_we_do/uk_supply/energy_mix/renewable/policy/feedin_tarriff/feedin_tarriff.aspx
5. DECC, 1st February 2010c. Feed-in Tariffs: Government’s Response to the
   Summer 2009 Consultation, page 5. http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/consultations/elec_financial/elec_financial.aspx
6. DECC, 1st February 2010a, ibid.
7. McKinsey & Company, 2009. Pathways to a Low Carbon Economy: Version 2 of the Global Greenhouse Gas Abatement Cost Curve. http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/ccsi/pathways_low_carbon_economy.asp
8. DECC, 1st February 2010a, ibid.
9. Suleiman Abu-Sharkh et al, March 2005. Microgrids: distributed on-site generation Technical Report 22, page 33. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
10. Manuel Frondel, Nolan Ritter, Christoph M. Schmidt, 2008. Germany’s solar cell promotion: Dark clouds on the horizon. Energy Policy 36 (2008) 4198–4204.
11. ibid.
12. http://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/paginas/Contenidosecciones.asp?ID=15&Cod=4965&Tipo=&Nombre=PV%20Solar%20News
13. DECC, 1st February 2010c, p21.
14. DECC, 1st February 2010c, p22.
15. DECC, 1st February 2010c, p22.
16. DECC, 1st February 2010c, p20.
17. DECC, 1st February 2010c, p5.
18. DECC, 1st February 2010c, p28.
19. DECC, 1st February 2010c, p40.
20. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/01/government-renewables-feed-in-tariff
21. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/feb/02/feed-in-tariff-renewable-energy
22. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8491767.stm
23. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/7129685/Solar-panels-and-other-renewables-will-be-installed-on-one-in-ten-homes.html
24. ibid.

Our bonds with other species are as vital, to survival, as our bonds with other people. If we don’t choose our company carefully, disaster is likely to ensue.

As a species, we should be shopping for the best relationships. There’s a lot a stake, and we don’t want to be abused or neglected. When searching for a good fit, we should keep in mind the following characteristics of good relationships.

Healthy Relationships Are:

• Supportive
• Stable
• Trustworthy
• Reciprocating
• Versatile
• Low Maintenance

Any signs of abusiveness, jealousy, extreme neediness, aloofness, instability, selfishness, should be bright red flags. To satiate our needs, we require an assortment of healthy relationships, from lovers and close friends, to co-workers and acquaintances. We know that too few or too many relationships can be a bad thing.

The most conspicuous relationships of the human species involve domesticated plants and animals. Our common pets, and almost all the food items in a grocery store, are domesticated organisms. These are the barnyard plants and animals we learn about from the moment we begin to talk.

But these creatures were not always domestic. All of them descend from wild ancestors, just as dogs descended from wolves. In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond provides an excellent overview of domestication’s history. The domestication of food plants and animals was the basis of the Neolithic Revolution, when Old Word hunter/gatherers became farmers. Diamond make a good point: the reason we domesticated wolves and wheat, instead of moose, zebras, or cheetahs, is because wolves and wheat had a natural tendency to associate with people.

Wolves, for instance, probably first encountered people while scavenging meat scraps from hunting camps. Since wolves and people where both social hunters at that time, and since both species had something to gain from cooperation (increased hunting success), it was highly likely that a relationship would form.

It was the same way with plants like wheat, which probably thrived in man made disturbances before it was domesticated. Out of this relationship people gained food, and wheat gained habitat. Moose, zebras, and cheetahs don’t associate with people, if they can help it, and don’t have much to gain from a relationship.

When examining the planet’s organisms, we find a whole spectrum of tendencies for associating with people. On one side, we have animals like spotted owls and arboreal salamanders, who have very different needs from people. They want little to do with us, because we have nothing to offer them. Endangered species are likely to occupy this side of the spectrum, because, as we modify their habitat to suite us, it becomes less suitable to them.

In the middle of the spectrum are organisms that have needs and habitats similar to ours. Deer for instance, were not abundant in Western Washington State, until people began clearing the old growth forest to suite their needs. While this activity seriously threatened the spotted owl, deer thrived in the fields and thick re-growth that resulted. Similarly, apple trees have a habit of sprouting up in disturbed forests around human settlements. Since people like to eat deer and apples, this is a happy relationship, and both parties have something to gain. But an important distinction is that these species do not absolutely need us. Deer and wild apples would do fine without human help, perhaps making use of natural burn areas. (Read Northwest Lands Northwest Peoples, edited by Goble and Hirt.)

At the far end of the spectrum are organisms that need humans to survive. Corn is an excellent example. In the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan pointed out that without human intervention, corn could not even reseed itself. Helplessly, corn relies completely on people for it’s propagation. Corn is so needy, it can only survive by rewarding the humans who plant it with prodigious amounts of food. Through the hybridization and genetic modification of corn and other domestic organisms, we make them still more dependent on us. If humans quit supporting them, these organisms would cease to exist.

The Domestication Spectrum:

The most domesticated organisms in the spectrum reward us with the greatest quantities of food, but it comes a cost. Anyone who’s noticed the luxurious lifestyle of some pet dogs has witnessed that cost. I am referring to the frightening phenomenon of co-domestication.

Sure, dogs keep us company, they intimidate thieves, and they fetch the paper. But these same dogs enjoy a constant supply of free food and the freedom to sleep the entire day, while their owners slave away at full time jobs. Who has domesticated whom? This article (PDF) sheds light on how powerfully canines have shaped our species, not just vice versa.

All domestic organisms are the same way. They give more because they need more. The reason they can yield so much more than their wild counterparts is that they have differed the work of their upkeep to us. As much as we have domesticated them, they have domesticated us. We do their bidding, even when it becomes painful.

But do we want to be domesticated? Jared Diamond demonstrated that such relationships have been a primary vector for pandemic diseases throughout history. Almost every plague can be traced back to a domestic animal, even the more recent "swine flu". Domesticated animals also develop much smaller brains than their wild counterparts. Neoteny, or juvenilization, is a common trait exhibited by domesticates, a phenomenon by which adult animals retain the traits of juveniles, becoming helpless, cute, dumb, and compliant. This process can happen in as little as fifty years, as demonstrated by Dmitri Belyaev’s experiment in domesticating the silver fox. The idea that humans have been similarly tamed is a chilling one. (See http://www.primitivism.com/domestic.htm for effects of domestication.)

Have our co-domesticates made lap dogs out of us? Consider that most of the calories you consume come from just four crops. Consider that most of the carbon that comprises your body was fixed by corn. Or take a drive through Middle America and see it stretch to the horizon; corn, corn, corn, corn…. Or better yet, visit the Gulf of Mexico’s vast "dead zone" where all the fertilizer washed from the Mississippi’s corn and soybean fields accumulates, and becomes a patch of lifeless reeking sea as broad as Massachusetts. (http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/general.html)

Who is in charge here? Whose greed is ravishing the planet? Is it the Exxon? Is it George W. Bush? Is it Wal-Mart?!

No. It’s corn. Corn is in charge.

People are conceited enough to believe that we are the cause of this nightmare. But if our species was really in control, the world would look a lot differently. However greedy we may be, it was never in our interest to pollute and overpopulate the planet, dine on high fructose corn syrup, work long hours plowing up the soil, and cover every arable acre with wheat, rice, and corn. This is, however, very much in the interest of corn.

The human/grain relationship is the definition of unhealthy. Of all the plants we could have loved, we’ve chosen the ones that destroy our home and feed us junk. This is abusive. If we had any spine at all, we’d ditch them forever.

As a species, it’s time we had a talk with crops like corn. What we ought to be saying is, "Look Corn, things started out alright between us. I remember when we first got together in Mexico, we hung out with Beans and Squash, we made tortillas together, it was beautiful. But things aren’t the same anymore. Corn, you’ve been so draining lately. I’ve taken you everywhere and given you everything; land, water, fertilizer, herbicide, even genetic modifications – do you have any idea how many prairies and watersheds I sacrificed? I butchered the nitrogen cycle for you! And what do I have to show for it?! Corn-syrup! Lousy corn fed beef! Diabetes and heart disease! That’s what I have to show for it! And if it was up to you, I’d never have anything else. A person can’t live on cornflakes alone! Corn, I’m an omnivore, I need variety, adventure, and Omega 3 fatty acids. I don’t mind having corn on the cob now and then, but corn syrup on every label? You’re even in my gasoline! I can’t go on like this. You’re jealously is insane! This relationship isn’t working for me anymore. I think it’s time I saw other species."

What would it mean, to divorce ourselves from our co-domesticates?

A healthier relationship with our food might resemble our hunter/gatherer past, when we utilized a greater diversity of plants and animals in our diet. Hunter/gatherers across the world eat somewhere in the ballpark of 200 different plant species. We are omnivores, descended from a long line of omnivores. Even our chimpanzee cousins eat about 200 plant species. Primate intelligence may have evolved, in part, to facilitate such an eclectic diet. Ethnobotanists estimate that indigenous people from my home region, the Columbia Plateau, utilized at least 135 plants for food. When we consider how many non-native plants are available to us, as the result of global exchange, it does not seem unreasonable to demand a 300-plant diet. This is not to mention animal foods, which lag not far behind plants in hunter/gatherer diets, in terms of number of species eaten. The markets of the undeveloped world are a tantalizing example of just how much culinary variety we miss out on in the industrialized world. Broadening the scope of our menu would certainly improve our health and the health of the planet.

A healthier relationship with food might also look a little more independent. By eating from a wider swath of the domestication spectrum, and avoiding the extremes, we could spare ourselves internal and external damages. For instance, most of the vegetable greens consumed by modern Americans come from domesticated crops grown in intensively managed fields, which is totally absurd. There is no shortage of wild greens growing in our waste places, even in urban settings. Commonly overlooked "weeds" such as nettles, lambs quarter, amaranth, purslane, etc. are higher in vitamin and mineral content than their domestic counterparts, and thrive with zero maintenance. Many of these taste as good, or better, than domesticated greens (see http://www.eattheweeds.com). They are more than abundant enough to meet the vitamin and mineral needs of everyone. If we incorporated these semi-wild plants in our diets, we would waste less money and energy, and preserve our integrity as low-maintenance omnivores. Instead, most of us continue to be trapped by our bias toward tame, high-maintenance things.

Few societies are as irrational as ours in this regard. Most of the world’s other cultures have realized that while some foods are worth the effort to cultivate, others are best harvested from the wild. The hunter/gatherer Indian cultures of the Northwest were happy to adopt domestic species like chickens, potatoes, and turnips. It was no stretch. After all, they had been gardening tobacco for a very long time. But almost nothing could stop them from harvesting huckleberries, or wild salmon. Only our culture would build the Grand Coulee Dam, thus terminating a free and abundant supply of wild salmon, in order to irrigate potatoes. Most long-established agricultural societies derive a significant part of their diet from the wild. Farming corn did not keep early American societies from dining on venison and nuts as well.

Sea food, the one wild harvest industry our society wasn’t so squeamish about, is rapidly being replaced by high-maintenance fish farms, and other forms of aquaculture. On the whole, the industrial world has done a very poor job of striking a balance between low and high maintenance sustenance strategies. Indeed, we seem to have an uncanny tendency toward the latter extreme. Why? Why would we go to so much trouble? Perhaps it is because, as any government employee can tell you, make-work can be profitable (the Grand Coulee Dam makes another pertinent example). But this is an entirely different topic, perhaps better covered by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine.

If you’re like me, make-work isn’t your forte. You’ve got better things to do than labor for things nature offers for free. You may also like the idea of moving your diet toward the healthy norm – two or three hundred plant species. Find out more about increasing the diversity of your habitat at: https://sites.google.com/site/humanhabitatproject.

It is so important in these times to work in collaboration and inspire each other. I have been so blessed to work with many of you through the Permaculture, Bioneers and Slow Food networks.

Over the last few years I have been able to dive deeply into the relationship connection from the field to table and table to field by participating in some amazing gatherings and courses. Terra Madre in 2006 and 2008, presenting at conferences and institutes, travelling to Africa for the International Permaculture Convergence and teaching design courses and workshops in Permaculture and healthy food systems.

In 2009 as Farm Supervisor at The Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, I was able to teach and farm in a way that was incredibly fun, demanding and rewarding. Throughout the year I took up a camera and tried to capture some of the magic. The result is this three part film that I recently uploaded to YouTube. If you get some moments and let it download in HD, it is fun to see what you have helped me accomplish, I really could not do all this without the invaluable support of my family, cohorts and friends like you. I truly am grateful and honoured to be supported and connected with so many revolutionaries.

Feel free to forward this film on to any you might think would enjoy.

Part I

Part II

Part III